After two or three decades of marriage, family vacations and raising children plus making your house a home, what could go wrong?

According to a Rutgers University professor and researcher, marital splits after age 50 happen more than expected.

“Gray Divorce: What We Lose and Gain from Mid-Life Splits" is a new book by author, researcher and Rutgers professor Jocelyn Elise Crowley, Ph.D., that examines the rising of divorce after age 50. The book uncovers the reasons why men and women divorce, and the penalties and benefits that they receive for their choices.

“I am a professor of Public Policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers,” said Crowley. “I teach on the New Brunswick campus. I grew up in Central Jersey. First I lived in Franklin Township. Then I moved to Warren Township. After graduate school in Massachusetts, I was so excited to begin my first job back in New Jersey at Rutgers. I have worked on the New Brunswick campus since 1999.”

This is her fourth book.

From the outside, Crowley said that many may ask why couples in mid-life and readying for retirement choose to make a drastic change in their marital status. In her book, she analyzes the differing experiences of women and men in this mid-life transition — the shift in individual priorities, the role of increased life expectancy, and how women are affected economically while men are affected socially.

According to Crowley, a “gray divorce” is simply a divorce where one member of the couple is age 50 or older.

“It has been becoming increasingly widespread across the country and is quite striking because over the past several decades, the divorce rate for the overall population has stabilized and even declined a bit,” she explained.

“In contrast, the gray divorce rate has risen. In between 1990-2010, the divorce rate for this age group actually doubled. Now, about one out of every four divorces is ‘gray.’”

Crowley shared some of the research that she conducted.

“Over the course of a couple of years, I interviewed 40 men and 40 women (none related) who had experienced a gray divorce," she said. "I asked them a range of questions, such as why they got a divorce, how their finances were affected by the divorce, and how their social relationships changed.

"Overall, I learned a lot about how their lives were completely transformed in the aftermath of their divorces.”

According to her research, she said there were major differences between the husbands and wives.

“Specifically, men did not like how things were being ‘done’ in their households," she said. "They cited financial problems and their spouses’ ‘financial infidelity’ — that is, of spending money behind their backs. They also objected to how their wives disciplined the children — often too leniently in their view.”

Women, on the other hand, faulted men’s bad behaviors rather than having problems with the "way things were done" in their households.

“Women blamed their husbands’ addictions as causing their divorces: drugs, alcohol, and pornography were key," she said. "Next they talked about their husbands’ patterns of abuse. They noted repetitive, severe emotional and verbal abuse in these cases.”

Aside from research, several chapters in the book relate to the effects of a gray divorce for women and men.

“Women face what I call an ‘economic gray divorce penalty.’ This means that because of a wide variety of circumstances, including pay discrimination, time taken out of work to care for children and parents, as well as occupational segregation, women are in a particularly financially vulnerable position when they divorce in mid-life,” she explained.

Men, she noted, are not left unscathed, either.

“They face what I call a ‘social gray divorce penalty.’ Due to male socialization patterns and reliance on their wives to maintain friendship networks, men frequently experience severe social isolation after a gray divorce," she said. "This also involves potential alienation from their own adult children.”

“For most, gray divorce hurts,” acknowledged Crowley. “There is no avoiding that reality. However, it does not have to stay that way forever. In other words, individuals can both experience the pain caused by the separation from their significant others in mid-life, and while that pain hopefully fades, begin to move on to lead new, fulfilling lives.”